Jane Austen's Niece Goes West

[Part 2 of the author's "Chinese Servants, Wild West
Stories, and the Vicissitudes of Homemaking in 1870s California: The Changing
Genres of Jane Austen's Niece, Catherine Anne (Austen) Hubback"]

atherine Hubback was
a prolific writer of novels and letters, whose work has undeservedly been
neglected. While her first works of fiction are courtship novels closely
modelled on, even directly inspired by, Jane Austen's novels,
her later fiction needs to be seen in the context of the condition-of-England
novels written by Disraeli or Gaskell and, after Hubback's move to America, of
domestic anecdotes set in the American Wild West. Her descriptive letters from
Oakland particularly deserve more attention as accounts of domestic life in
California in the 1870s and as anecdotal writing that makes up for the
relatively sparse output of fiction produced during her last years in America.

Providing intriguing
insight into the customs, prevailing attitudes, and acutely observed prejudices
in the small communities in which Hubback spent the last years of her life, her
letters conjure up a vivid description of domesticity in the American West as
experienced by an elderly Englishwoman who saw herself as an outsider commenting
critically on "American" behaviour, but became actively involved in the
community, an insider writing detailed accounts of her daily life to relatives
in England. Her comments on her naturalisation or assimilation and the
adaptation to American life undergone by the two sons who settled there are
moreover significantly juxtaposed with her vividly descriptive and wittily
critical accounts of the increasingly multiethnic composition of American
society. Detailed with the same merciless acuity that readers of Austen's novels
and her surviving letters are familiar with, Hubback's America casts a different
light on prevailing attitudes at the time, sharply contrasting ideologies and
politics with daily realities. Ranging from the first finished completion of
Jane Austen's uncompleted novels, which clearly shows her indebtedness to Austen
as well as the closeness of their writing, to letters about the domestic chores
of Chinese servants in California, Hubback's writing displays a breadth of
interest informed by a satirical eye for inconsistencies and hypocrisies that
single out her letters as unique representations of the ideals and realities of
assimilation in 1870s America.

Although Catherine Hubback published nine more novels
after her completion of her aunt's abandoned fragment "The Watsons" under the
title of The Younger Sister in 1850, her works have so far been
unaffected by the growing interest in "forgotten" Victorian women writers. Her
novels are now rarely read and hard to obtain; studies limited to her role as
Jane Austen's niece — a reductive emphasis that was admittedly cultivated by
Catherine Hubback herself. Although born after Austen's death, Hubback
contributed much to the perpetuation of family history. When Austen's nephew
James Edward Austen-Leigh published his Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, he
listed her as "one of the channels along which biographical information [about
Austen] was transmitted" (235). Born on 7 July 1818,
Catherine was the eighth child of Jane Austen's brother Francis, a successful
naval officer who became Admiral of the Fleet, and his first wife, Mary Gibson,
who bore him eleven children. Five years after her death in 1823, Francis
married Martha Lloyd, who had long lived with old Mrs Austen and her two eldest
daughters. Cassandra, Jane's elder sister, continued to be a frequent visitor,
introducing Francis's daughters to their aunt's works, including the untitled
manuscripts of what have come to be known as "Sanditon" and "The Watsons".
Catherine either made copies for herself during one of these visits or managed
to recollect enough details to use the characters and projected plot of "The
Watsons" to write The Younger Sister years later. In his autobiography,
Cross Currents in a Long Life, privately printed in 1935, her eldest son,
John Henry Hubback, recalls his mother's and aunt's ability to carry on "long
conversations on all sorts of subjects, almost entirely by means of quotations
from their aunt's novels" and asserts that since Catherine "had studied this
manuscript with her Aunt Cassandra so effectively,"
"she was able to reproduce from memory the text of this manuscript almost word
for word, despite the seven years' interval since she had seen it" (5).
As a channel for
biographical information about Jane Austen, the Hubbacks continued to be of
importance. Together with his daughter Edith Charlotte, John Henry Hubback wrote
a biography of Austen's "sailor brothers", his own grandfather, Francis Austen,
and his youngest brother, Charles. Until the recent publication of Brian
Southam's Jane Austen and the Navy, John and Edith Hubback's book had
been the only extensive account of Francis Austen's life.

While her family
connections have resulted in sporadic references to her role as a channel for
biographical information and the first to complete one of Austen's fragments,
they have ironically also barred Catherine Hubback's inclusion in the revised
canon of lesser known writers of nineteenth-century popular fiction. Like a
number of women writers at the time, Hubback turned to the writing of fiction
for financial reasons, and memories of Austen's fragments might have provided an
easy start. In 1842 she married the barrister John Hubback. Their first child,
Mary, only lived long enough to be baptised and died in 1843. John Henry, the
eldest surviving child, was born in 1844, followed by Edward Thomas in 1846 and
Charles Austen — whose second name is yet another indication of the family's
cultivation of the Austen-connection — in 1847. In the same year John suffered a
mental breakdown. After three years of disappointed hopes of his recovery, he
was committed to an asylum, and Catherine returned to her father's house. It was
in order to support herself and her three children that she started writing
fiction. Whether a completion of Austen's fragment was seen as a guarantee of
success, a desperate seizing of a plot, or simply the result of a long cherished
youthful aspiration, sparked off during one of Cassandra's visits, unrelated to
any more "mercenary" motivation, has to remain a subject of conjecture.

Hubback was, however,
already collecting material for her novels during the journeys in search for
health that followed her husband's breakdown, thus showing that she was planning
to continue writing fiction and to choose settings and subjects different from
her aunt's. Malvern, a watering place where Catherine and her husband stayed
immediately after his collapse, served as the setting of her fourth novel,
Malvern, or the Three Marriages (1855), and her collection of material in
South Wales in 1849 became the subject of The Old Vicarage (1856). Hubback's
most successful novel was Agnes Milbourne (1856), a story dealing with a
young woman's dilemma over the conflicting claims of the Episcopalian and the
Presbyterian church. The publication of The Younger Sister moreover predated the
canonisation of Austen. Roger Sales has suggested that the popularity of James
Edward Austen-Leigh's reverent patronising of Austen's age in the Memoir
"can be seen as launching the Austen industry"
(3) As Brian
Southam has pointedly put it, the "seventy years from 1870 to 1940 saw the
emergence of Jane Austen as a popular author, the most widely read and loved of
all the classic novelists of English literature"
(102). In 1860,
Catherine's son John was later to recall "[n]o one of my new acquaintances or
associates knew anything about Jane Austen and her novels; they were not at that
period highly appreciated outside of literary society"
(Hubback, Cross Currents, 7).
In contrast, when he published Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers
together with Edith Hubback Brown
in 1906, he felt
the need to preface the book with an apology for yet another work on Austen's
family: "Perhaps some apology may be expected on behalf of a book about Jane
Austen, having regard to the number which have already been put before the
public in past years"
(vii).

Nevertheless, Catherine
Hubback clearly capitalised on her relationship with the famous aunt she never
met when marketing her books, although this tendency became more pronounced
after the publication of the Memoir. In a letter to her son John, dated
September 1871, she admits having used her maiden name as a publishing strategy
for "The Stewardess' Story" and refers to additional short stories intended to
appear under her new pseudonym: "By & bye they can be all put in a vol. &
published again. I mean in future to have my name printed Mrs C. Austen Hubback
& make believe the A. stands for that. I never have written it at length so
nobody knows and Austen is a good nom de plume"
(Hubback, Letters: Sept 1871).
The "A." of course
stood for Anne. Before the publication of "The Stewardess' Story" Hubback had
published as plain Mrs Hubback. In the dedication to The Younger Sister,
she describes herself as a niece of Jane Austen who, "though too young to have
known her personally, was from early childhood taught to esteem her virtues and
admire her talents"
(dedication). As
a similar tribute to her aunt's writing, Hubback named the heroine of her second
novel, The Wife's Sister, finished in 1851, Fanny Mansfield. The
heroine's name, however, is the only connection to Austen. A mid-Victorian story
with a moral that is emphatically driven home, concerned with the shifting laws
of marriage and the legalities of inheritance, the novel has more in common with
Victorian sensation novels of the 1860s.

This shift is
anticipated in Hubback's completion of "The Watsons". The Youngest Sister
is modelled closely on what had been handed down as Aunt Jane's intentions by
her family, yet it adapts the plot to introduce specifically Victorian
preoccupations. Mr Howard's shortcomings, for example, are subjected to a
phrenological analysis: "Had phrenology then been in fashion, it is possible
that the origin of this weakness would have been discovered in the absence of
the bump of self-esteem."
(vol.2, 114).
When Tom Mosgrove (Musgrave in Austen's fragment) proposes to the heroine's
sister while drunk and then denies the engagement, her brother moreover
instantly recognises "a brilliant perspective of litigation, an action for
breach of promise of marriage to be conducted"
(vol., 114).
The Younger Sister
is a self-consciously historical novel and at the same time, a fond recreation
of the Regency that predates the large-scale "Victorianisation" of Jane Austen
and her time in the Memoir. As a result, Hubback's use of "The Watsons"
caused resentment among some of her cousins for more reasons than one. An 1862
letter from Anna Lefroy to James Edward Austen-Leigh clearly shows their fears
that Hubback might similarly appropriate "Sanditon", Austen's unfinished last
novel: Have you
seen or heard of E.A. Leigh's vol — Lady Susan — I think he's mean not to
send it to me — very mean and real ugly, & I feel quite bad about it & shall not
have a good time till I get it — I am real mad — (not that I am a bit — but
these are Californian expressions — ). He has not said the first thing about
sending it. I have to keep my Californian aired, for use in my stories, so I
practice it on you." (Hubback,
Letters: Sept 1871)

More importantly,
Hubback's triumphant outburst shows her intentions to continue using a
Californian setting and to keep her "Californian aired,"
as she put it. Yankee voices feature in "The Stewardess' Story,"
even while the main protagonist is an Englishwoman. The issue of The Overland
Monthly that printed Hubback's first Wild West story includes entries with
revealing titles such as "Tropical California,"
"In the Wilds of Western Mexico,"
and "The Oregon Indians". Hubback was aiming for a particular venue and a
particular — primarily Californian — readership, yet it clearly emerges from her
letters that she was genuinely fascinated by her subject. Her earlier fiction,
though markedly different, prefigures this absorption of a region as well as of
topical preoccupations. Just as she took up legal issues and specifically
inconsistent marriage laws — a theme that came to be central in mid- and
late-Victorian fiction, from Wilkie Collins's sensation novel Man and Wife
(1870) to Mrs Frewin's little known, anonymously published, The
Inheritance of Evil, or The Consequences of Marrying a Deceased Wife's Sister
(1849), which might have inspired Hubback's own novel, her American writing
shows the influence of her surroundings as well as of fiction published at the
time in California.

"The Stewardess' Story" is a short,
almost pithy, wittily told story about a stewardess's innocent involvement in
the smuggling of instruments to produce counterfeit banknotes. Far removed from
the rambling triple-deckers which Hubback had, in
fact, been partly forced to write by her publishers, the story is fast-moving,
driven by suspense, and moreover interspersed with Californian expressions that
greatly contribute to its vividness. Mrs Ford, the stewardess, is tricked by two
friendly passengers into hiding a piece of equipment in her trunk and to conceal
a mysterious envelope. The couple claims to be concerned about the invention of
a new spool which they wish to have patented. Helpfully carrying their infant
son on shore, Mrs Ford is subjected to the degradation of being physically
searched by the rough Yankee women in the customs office. The description
becomes almost farcical: "She shrank from the examination, she cried, she
sobbed, she grew hysterical; and, her nervous excitement being mistaken for
guilt, she was in consequence subjected to a more rigorous examination"
(340). The pandemonium that breaks loose
alerts the stewardess's captain, who interrupts the procedure, and Mrs Ford is
saved. When they later discover the friendly passengers' true identity as part
of "a gang of forgers who have been passing counterfeit greenbacks" (341)
and the nature of the smuggled items, they quickly destroy the evidence, since
an investigation would implicate Mrs Ford. The criminals are thus allowed to go
free, only punished by Mrs Ford's snub and the destruction of some of their
equipment.

It is this refusal to furnish the story
with a moral ending that not sharply distinguishes it from Hubback's earlier
fiction, but also accounts for its refreshing quality and expresses her interest
in the Wild West as a source of stories. That Catherine Hubback did not
necessarily think much of justice in the American West clearly emerges from her
letters, and her comments are not always light-hearted. "I do not think the
morals of California have been making a very brilliant figure in the world
lately," she writes in a letter in December 1872: "Mrs Fair's murders, trials
and acquittal, the forgeries and escape of the Brothertons and the great fraud
about the diamond fields, have made more conspicuous that creditable figures"
(Hubback, Letters: 1 Dec 1872). In May 1876 she refers
to "a great many burglaries about Oakland," but
stresses that she feels secure with only her Chinese boy in the house:

That is one reason why people think me
so brave because I don't mind being left with only little Phun in the house. How
should anybody know. Phun could only tell his countrymen, and I am not afraid of
them. I never hurt any of them — and I don't believe they would hurt me." [Hubback, Letters: 21 May 1876).

The
role of her Chinese servants in her letters is perhaps the most intriguing
aspect of her late writing, pinpointing both her change of focus from English
Great Houses to domesticity in the American West and a corresponding shift from
an increasingly moralising tone in her novels to a witty and markedly perceptive
critique of double standards in her late stories and letters. Her repeated
defence of the China boys against what she sees as a crucial inconsistency in
ostensibly egalitarian conceptualisations of republican ideologies stands out
among the representations of Chinese immigrants at the time. In the anecdotes
that abound in her letters, Hubback repeatedly makes use of the hypocrisy that
the treatment of the Chinese comes to embody to rail against what she sees as
specifically American attitudes. While her exposures of what she shows to be an
assumed American superiority are as refreshing as they are witty, they are
admittedly also interrupted by a central contrast between a nostalgically
recalled England — and particularly the English manners of her youth — and
Yankee freedoms.

Hubback's initial
reaction to the American West is reflected in her first American short story,
"The Stewardess' Story". The rough women who have to search Mrs Ford scream in
their Yankee voices, creating a comically detailed pandemonium: "added to Mrs
Ford's hysterical screams, were the remonstrances of the searchers, delivered in
the highest key of a Yankee voice"
(340). Yet there
is also a more sinister aspect to Mrs Ford's situation as a wrongly suspected
Englishwoman in America. If the evidence is not destroyed, her captain argues,
she might "at any rate, have a whole peck of trouble; and, being English, I
think she might, likely enough, have some difficulty in establishing her perfect
innocence." (343)
Her status as a
foreigner was one of Hubback's early grievances. In "The Stewardess' Story" it
is this fear of being in a particular "peck of trouble" because of a failure to
be American that leads to the destruction of the evidence, thus doubly forming
one of Hubback's jabs at justice in the Wild West. A closer look at her letters
reveals significant shifts in her point of view and insight into the changing
problems of homemaking in the American West in the 1870s.